Union Pipes - Irish Traditional Music Archive

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FOrerUnnerS OF ‘UnIOn PIPeS’
modern by the bellows at the elbow or Uilean’, 54 the latter word a
form of the Irish word for elbow. In referring to the old Irish word
‘Cuislanagh, Pipers’, Vallancey says
‘I think Bagpipers; because they at this day call a piper by that name,
and he names the bellows, bollog na Cuisli, the bellows of the Cuisli, or
Veins of the Arm, at the first joint, and on the outside is Ullan or the
elbow – so that I take Ullan Pipes and Cuisli pipes to be the same...’. 55
Vallancey’s coinage of ‘Ullan Pipes’ was motivated by a wish to
make a connection with the ‘woollen pipes’ of Shakespeare in The
Merchant of Venice. When Walker came to print in 1786 he repeated
Vallancey’s observations and passed on his supposition:
‘Vallency [sic] concludes that Ullan Pipes and Cuisle Pipes are one and
the same’. 56
In time, as will be seen, this first term, which has no ancestry before
Vallancey but was coined by him, would give rise to the term
‘uilleann pipes’.
54
Charles Vallancey to Joseph Cooper Walker in undated questionnaire, TCD MS
1461 (I) T51, fols 182–6.
55
Charles Vallancey, undated letter to Joseph Cooper Walker, in TCD MS 1461–7
T.66 fol. 242. ‘Cuisli Pipes’ were not bagpipes but mouth-blown Irish pipes of
antiquity.
56
Walker 1786: 76. This is the first appearance of these terms in print. For further
details see Carolan 1981: 4–9. Another unreliable contemporary Irish
antiquarian, William Beauford, incorrectly used the term adharcaidh ciuil for
bagpipes (Beauford 1781: 244) but he meant mouth-blown bagpipes. Walker
1786: 76 followed Beauford in this.